Athenaeum Of Ohio LPMP

Systematic Training in Cafeteria Catholicism

In
1999 and 2000 I went through the entire Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP (Lay
Pastoral Ministry Program,) passing all courses and receiving all A's
except for one B and one C. The details of that journey will be laid out
in other pages within the Catholic American Thinker website.
This program was the pre-requisite program for entry into the Deaconate
program in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. The Parish Council of my
church, which can be seen at Holy Cross (Lithuanian) Catholic Church
in Old North Dayton, Ohio, offered to pay for my fees, books and
expenses, but I turned the offer down as I was making pretty good money
and didn't want to take the money and potentially "let them down" if
things didn't work out. As it turned out, I'm glad I made that
decision.

The whole program was an exercise in futility. My sole
purpose for entering the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program was to
eventually be ordained a Deacon and help out at Holy Cross. In other,
more orthodox dioceses, I would have just immediately gone into the
Deacon Formation program, and if I met all the requirements of the
program I would have been ordained. But the particular Church of
Cincinnati had this LPMP program established as a "doorkeeper" program
in place to effectively filter out those of us who were too orthodox in
our Catholicism. "Rigid" is the popular buzz word among those who are
more heterodox in their Catholicism, and who want to see looser moral
rules, sloppier doctrine and more modern and catchy liturgy.

The very first day - the opening day
of the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program - was such an obvious eye opener
that I'm still kicking myself for not just dropping the whole project
that very day. It became THAT OBVIOUS that the whole program was geared
toward an extraordinarily Liberal Feminist agenda whose goal was
nothing less than a complete redefinition of "Church." (Notice I left
out the word Catholic.)

We had all been notified that we
were to obtain and read at least the first 14 chapters of "The Church
Emerging From Vatican II: A Popular Approach to Contemporary
Catholicism" by Dennis M. Doyle; Twenty Third Publications. The author,
Dennis Doyle, was to be the keynote speaker and would answer questions.

I managed to read the whole book in time, but only with
extensive use of a highlighter and side notes, because virtually
everything in it was highly questionable, from a Roman Catholic
perspective. The gist of the thing was a major push for female ordination.
And, not surprisingly, so were the author's remarks. One of which was
that there was "no such thing as a cafeteria Catholic," the term used by
conservative Catholics to describe those who pick-and-choose among the
Catholic teachings, including even elements of the Creed, that they will hold and live by.

So,
the opening day of the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program, when Mr. Doyle
finished his remarks and asked for questions, I asked him one related to
contraception. In that publicized polls openly available showed that
something like half the Catholics in America practice artificial
contraception, defined in Catholicism as a mortal sin, and yet they
still came to Communion, and given that thousands of priests apparently
had no real problem with that, and further given that there were plenty
of bishops who were taking no action at all on this highly publicized
situation, how then could Mr. Doyle claim that there was no such thing as cafeteria Catholicism in America?

The
answer took a long time, and a whole lot of words. Mr. Doyle had
studied this particular matter very hard; he had studied it and prayed
about it, and consulted priests and spiritual directors, and confessors,
and theologians, and prayed some more, and - finally - he had come to
the "decision" that, for him, personally, regular use of artificial contraception was not a mortal sin. See?

This
was an absolute confession to being a cafeteria Catholic, the very
thing he denied existed. I didn't press the issue; later I would wish
that I had pressed it. It seemed to me at that point to be the place
where an attorney would "rest his case" the whole point having been
proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But later discussions with classmates
revealed that many of them, perhaps most, for all I know, agreed with
Mr. Doyle's position, and STILL didn't "believe" in cafeteria
Catholicism. ??? I was to continuously encounter cafeteria Catholicism
among the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP students as well as among the Athenaeum
of Ohio LPMP faculty.

Thus I began the journey through the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program. There was a Liturgy of the Word
session in the Athenaeum Chapel. This was the Chapel of Archbishop
Pilarczyk; the Athenaeum was also his residence, we were given to
understand. We would see him and perhaps be seated with him in the
cafeteria. The Blessed Sacrament was not present in the Chapel; I asked
where He was and was told He was way "over there" out of the way behind
some screens.

This "liturgy" was interesting. Sr. Nancy, who
would turn out to be the chief doorkeeper (meaning filter of the
orthodox) for the Archbishop's Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program, did the
Gospel reading, although there were deacons and priests present.
Another lady handled the incense. Then, this other lady gave us a
highly animated, artistic, dramatic "homily" of sorts. There were all
sorts of changes in facial expression and voice inflection that had to
be seen; this was a "performance" in the true sense of the word. I would
learn that a major theme in the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP course work
would involve what I call showmanship aspects of ministry.
Meaning, making eye contact with the congregation, and speaking with
enthusiasm while performing the function of the Lector during the Mass.
The whole thing seemed more appropriate to Hollywood or a stage than to any Catholic holy space.

Other
pages on this topic will address specific courses of study within the
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program; here I will just make a few broad-brush
remarks on the whole thing. If there was one single overarching factor
that contributed the most to the error taught in the Archbishop’s name
and by his authority in his Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program, I would say
that it was the absolute embracing of the Scripture study method known
as the Historical-Critical method. This "interpretation" would infect to some degree nearly every course in the program.

Historical
criticism is the art - not science - that seeks to separate truth from
falsehood concerning "facts" from the past. Applied to Scripture, it
studies the written texts themselves, using negative argument,
conjecture and a priori argument. The practitioner assumes the role of
the "objective" expert examiner, which is to say the examination must
not be made from a position of belief or unbelief in the material being
examined. Which immediately poses a problem for someone using the
method to study material that contains miracles. Such as, the
Resurrection. Nevertheless, this is the method of Scripture study that
was heavily emphasized throughout the coursework in the Athenaeum of
Ohio LPMP program.

I submit that many of the scholars using the historical critical method suffered from the error of the Modernist Heresy regarding the over-emphasis of natural science over theological science. Indeed, in the thoroughly Modernist view, natural science is the only
science there is; everything else is something other than science. And
so we see scholars seeking purely worldly and material explanations for
the ephemeral, and not even recognizing what they are doing. The
foregone conclusion must be that whatever miracle is to be studied
cannot have happened, because material evidence for it may not be
obtained. Which largely explains why it seems that those favoring the
historical-critical method seem to have never met a miracle they
couldn't call into question.

The fact that I didn't buy into the
method right up front should have foretold problems for me in the
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP classes. Bottom line, all Scripture analysis is,
in the end, editorial criticism, pure and simple, done on work
that is thousands of years old. Editorial criticism is purely and
exclusively subjective; there is and can be nothing whatsoever objective
about it. It is the writing of someone being analyzed by the mind of
someone else. If a modern newspaper can have multiple wildly differing
criticisms of the same current book in the same issue, why would any
ancient writing not be subject to the same wild variety of possible
interpretation?

This pseudo-scientific approach to Scripture
analysis was also coupled with a Leftist-liberal approach to culture in
general and the Church in particular, and this was discernable in most
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP classes and class material. As it is in American
Catholicism in general. A good example is my favorite commentary, The
New Jerome Biblical Commentary, a publication with which I have a long
running love-hate relationship. I love the historical and cultural
insights it gives me regarding a particular Scriptural place and time; I
hate the unfeeling coldness, total lack of devotion and
pseudo-scientism of the scholarly authors, trying so hard to be so
naturalistic and "empirical" while explaining the purely unnatural and
unempirical.

Their liberalism shines through on page 1169. There
they misinterpret a quote from the Vatican II document Dei Verbum
regarding the inerrancy of Scripture. Dei Verbum tells us that the books
of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching, firmly, faithfully and
without error; the Commentary then italicizes the following phrase to give it special emphasis the authors did not intend: "that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation."
They failed to note the Dei Verbum footnotes attached to this
instruction pointing back to the same solemn definition in Vatican I.
The false implication is that there is a break here with the past, and
that now Liberals are free to pick and choose among Scripture what they
think God intended for our salvation. Sound like movement toward the
Protestant dogma of Sola Scriptura?

Now, this particular Catholic Commentary
is a firm, trusted Catholic resource that a whole lot of us depend on;
you can see that the problems we're talking about are not unique to the
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program, but to the larger American infection
that contributes if not causes many of those problems. The Athenaeum of
Ohio LPMP program only made me more acutely aware of the broader problem
in America.

To show the extent of what we're talking about here,
consider Canon 1024 which states that only a baptized male validly
receives sacred ordination. That is crystal clear; it is firmly
established infallibly by the Church, and is a teaching that is to be
definitively held. However, when you go to page 723 of the "Code of
Canon Law: A Text And Commentary" you find in the "commentary" regarding
it remarks implying the sexism of the Church and providing
encouragement for those working for "equal rights" to not limit their
efforts to raise the consciousness of the people on this "fundamental
and sensitive issue."

Gimme a break.

Will the real Catholic resource please stand up?

Where the hell are the American bishops? Or are they the ones who wrote this stuff?

But
the worst of it is in what they did to the Word, in the sacred liturgy,
and in the New American version, through the use of "dynamic
equivalence" and feminizing of the language.

St. Jerome, I think
we will all agree, did an outstanding job on the original Vulgate, using
whatever sources he had at his disposal around 400 AD. Why these new
guys think they can do better with the "oldest extant" copies - none of
which are older than what Jerome used - to make any new version is
beyond me. They imagine themselves superior to Jerome.

Consider
Luke 1:28, the angel's greeting to the Blessed Virgin: "Hail, full of
grace, . . . " There is a whole theology built up over the centuries
around that rather unique Scriptural greeting. And what do the new
experts give us? "Hail favored daughter." What the hell is that?
If these "scholars" were to be true to their claimed craft then they
should have been translating rather than interpreting. That is a flat
out subjective interpretation that cannot be construed as a direct
translation.

There are many, many other examples, many of them pointed out in multiple issues of my favorite periodical, First Things,
that are equally egregious. Perhaps the worst is the interpretations
that loose the connection between the opening words of Genesis and the
opening words of John. These new "scholars" pay no attention whatsoever
to what has been before, they just plunge ahead in their
pseudo-sophisticated certainty of being right, or maybe right-on, or up-to-date.

Pseudo-scientific
historical-critical methodology was hyped throughout the Athenaeum of
Ohio LPMP course work, and the inferior translations infected almost
every class to some degree.

The so-called historical critical method is only a useful tool for atheists and unbelievers. It requires the practitioner to put his faith aside, and that is something that is against our Catholic religion for us to do. Holy Scripture was written in cooperation with the Holy Spirit and it must be read in cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Anyone who merely "reads" it on his own can never rise above the level of being an amateur Scripture scholar and will never get out of it what the Holy Spirit put into it. To these new scholars, there's nothing holy about it; it's just another book. These scholars are only recognized as professional among the unbelievers; among the real Christian Scripture scholars, they are rank amateurs. They ape and mimic their heroes among all of
TTRSTF4
in the hope of being accepted into SOME group of fellow scholars in which they might be recognized as professionals.

And, of course, they are recognized as highly professional in the
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program, as they are among the majority of
America's Catholic bishops.

You can see this is a broader topic than the program of the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program.

Nevertheless,
I shall concentrate in future pages on the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP
process because, having been through it, I have all the course material
and all the "debate" material from so many confrontations with various
faculty members that they turn out to be the best target, representative
as they are of the larger American problems. The Athenaeum of Ohio
LPMP teaches error. To say that a majority of it is heterodox teaching
is not a stretch; there are parts of it that are borderline heresy.

At
the completion of my studies at the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program,
although I seem to have won all the debates with all the professors, I
lost the war; I was not invited into the Deaconate program. Protests to
the good Archbishop hit a dead end with me when one of his responses
indicated there was nothing particularly "heterodox" about official
teaching material in a Catholic Christology class that called into
question the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That sealed it for me.

It
showed me the true goal of the Archbishop of Cincinnati and his
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP institution. Some of the other fellow orthodox
"rejects" from the program informed me that they had later been accepted
into Deacon formation after pleading and re-pleading their case. But
by that time I had determined that I would not so much as learn what
this man had to teach, let alone pass it on and teach it to others. I
cannot participate in so great a sin. Nor can I take an oath of
obedience to a heterodox bishop who knowingly allows error to be taught
in his name.

And the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program is the
responsibility of Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, and him alone. It's his
baby. And I can state categorically that proper catechesis in the
Particular Church of Cincinnati is solely his responsibility.

He
can claim that he personally never taught any of the error that I will
lay out in the Catholic American Thinker. And perhaps he never
did.

But all the erroneous Catholicism that I was taught in the
Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP program was taught in HIS name, by HIS authority,
by HIS faculty, at HIS Catholic teaching institution, where he lived
and took his meals.

And he can't claim that he didn't know about it, because I told him about it, and I really can't believe I'm the only one.

Lots more coming; stay tuned.

Many others have encountered elsewhere in America the same problems I
encountered in the Athenaeum of Ohio LPMP, but few have been very
public about their experiences.

An excellent related work
covering the whole problem in America is the following book, which I
cannot recommend highly enough. It declares, with heavy evidence, That
America's priest shortage is "artificial and contrived."

Goodbye, Good Men! How Catholic Seminaries Turned Way Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood; Michael S. Rose; Aquinas Publications.

I believe that this book shows, in a very conservative way, the tip of an iceberg: just a very small part of a new counter-magisterium;
a cabal of dissident bishops seeking to change the very nature of the
Church. Like today's political Leftists, who seek to transform our
Constitution into a "living, organic" guideline and thus open to infinitely broad interpretation,
rather than a solidly fixed legal document that says very specific
legal things, and that says nothing whatsoever regarding anything that
is not specifically in it, these bishops seek to make Revelation itself infinitely modifiable.

This is something that needs to be pointed out and illuminated by somebody, and it needs to be opposed by everybody.

=====

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You are so right about this post-modern world that I cringe at where it is all heading. There appears to be no precedent for what is developing, and history cannot be a guide for a trend that suffers from selective amnesia.

My main concern is the lack of solidarity that exists in the remnant. We need to know who to lock arms with and far too little is being done to see that leaders are visible and that their message is broadcast far and wide.

As a former infantry officer I see the strategic side of this battle for hearts and minds as next to lost. We only have hope in the 1-25 year old demographic and that hope will fade too if they fail to see courageous witness of true Catholicism and true martyrdom.

I wish there was a draft call and a place where we could sign up for this all important final battle.
Where is Spartacus?

Date: Tue Feb 24 18:20:26 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Michael:

Good question.
My hope is in the 1-25 year old demographic you mentioned. Each time I begin to feel that all is lost, another of the youngsters at Church gets my attention in some really positive way. I really don’t believe that they are as liberal as most of their teachers and most of their surrounding cultural environment would have them be. Many are bucking the trend, and they give me hope.

Perhaps a Spartacus will arise from among them. Perhaps Sarah Palin may turn out to be our non-Catholic and female Spartacus in the political arena.

The first battle must be fought with our rosaries rather than our guns. Join or start a prayer group is the best advice I can give at the moment.

My husband was just "released" from our diocesan diaconate program....why? Too rigid. He had just completed his third year.

Your words resonate.

Date: Wed Sep 30 18:39:58 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Catherine:

Welcome to the club.

Regards,

Vic

Note:

Friday, October 05, 2012

As part of the ongoing effort to upgrade this whole website, upgraded this webpage to the new BB 2.0 - SBI! 3.0 release and to make use of the new reusable code features.
An earlier phase of this major conversion corrupted or adversely affected some fonts, alignments, quotes and tables in the previously published webpages. Not to worry; this phase is converting them all, one by one.
Eventually, every webpage on this site will have the same look and feel as this one.
LOVE this new release!

Regards,

Vic

Date: Thu Jul 24 2014From: Vic BiorsethComment:

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL
and name from
Thinking Catholic Strategic
Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option
June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages. .

Regards,

Vic

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The Purpose of this grouping of links is to organize all site Cafeteria Catholic webpages in one place for easier reference.

LPMP Cafeteria Catholic Pages.In the Cincinnati Archdiocese, the Athenaeum Of Ohio's LPMP (Lay Pastoral Ministry Program) consistently taught a do-it-yourself - let-your-conscience-be-your-guide Catholicism to future Lay Catholic Pastoral Ministers. Just think about that term for a moment. What have laymen to do with Pastoral Ministry in the Catholic Church? This was an Alinsky-Lite program of evil disinformation aimed at weakening Church authority and loosening Church doctrine in the minds of Catholic laymen.

"We belong to the Church militant; and She is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass Her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights.”--Pope Pius XII

"It is not lawful to take the things of others to give to the poor. It is a sin worthy of punishment, not an act deserving a reward, to give away what belongs to others."--St. Francis of Assisi

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may deride it, but in the end, there it is.—Winston
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who
deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.—Ayn Rand

Atheist Genesis:

In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing.
And then nothing accidentally exploded and created everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally encountered other bits of everything and formed some new kinds of everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into self-replicating bits of everything.
And then some self-replicating bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into dinosaurs.
See?

“ … for I have sworn upon
the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind
of man.” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in
the year of our Lord 1800. The context
involved resistance to any form of Christianity or Deism legally imposing
itself throughout the USA. We must wonder what he might say
about our current government's forced imposition of strict secularism – i.e.,
anti-theism – throughout the USA. I submit that legally enforced secularism of society, like theocracy, like Marxism,
and like Islam, is, precisely, a form of tyranny over the mind of man.Nothing good can come from the religious cleansing of Judaeo-Christian society. Government imposed secularism is just another form of theocracy.